Manage houshold tasks/projects

mlinane says:

I'm new to this and I'm trying to set things up to work with GTD (which I'm just starting to learn). I've seen other posts related to GTD, but I'm a stay-at-home-mom so I'm looking for any ideas on how you've used RTM to set up household chores and other tasks and projects related to running a household. Thanks.

Posted at 4:03pm on September 4, 2007

ranbarton says:

Hello-

I think the basic tool for any sort of chore is a repeating task.

RTM has two types of repeat - the first repeats at a fixed interval, and is useful for things like taking out the trash, and the second repeats a certain period after a task is completed, and is good for things you want to do periodically, but on a more ad hoc basis. An example of this in my house is cleaning filters in humidifiers - I have a 7-day recurrence on this.

You can read about these features here:
http://www.rememberthemilk.com/help/answers/tasks/repeattask.rtm
http://www.rememberthemilk.com/help/answers/basics/repeatformat.rtm

The next thing I'd suggest are tags, which let you easily group items. Tags can define the room in your house, the person(s) who could do the chore, or any other thing you can think of.

Tags can be very handy when married to the http://www.flylady.net/ methodology for keeping a house in shape, for example.

Another example is I have an errand tag and then when I click on errands in the tag cloud, I see all of the pending items on that list. Similarly, I have a smartlist set to show me the tasks I have slated for the coming weekend, so I can easily get a sense of how packed the weekend ease while we are planning activities.

That's a start. Feel free to ask more questions or to offer more specifics.

There are some great ideas for useful smartlists here on the board - Emily has a nice summary here:
http://blog.rememberthemilk.com/2007/05/21-useful-searches-for-your-tasks.html

Posted 7 years ago

castiron says:

A couple smartlists I've found useful for household stuff:

Undone routine tasks -- isRepeating:true AND due:never. I have a bazillion tasks that I'd like to do regularly, and if I assigned due dates to all of them when I entered them, I'd quickly get overwhelmed. This list lets me park stuff and add tasks to my household routines gradually; when I have some time, I scan this list and see if there's something I can do right now.

A list of tasks whose estimated time is 15 minutes or less.

And as Ranbarton says, definitely make use of tags. You can tag for tasks that can be done with kids underfoot vs. tasks that need kid-free time, tasks that should ideally be done daily but that you don't necessarily want showing up on the "today" list every day (give them a longer frequency, and just scan the "daily"-tagged items every day and check off the ones you've done), etc. Tags are what give you your GTD context lists, and the beauty of them is that you can easily have a task in more than one context.

Posted 7 years ago

raymond.bergmark says:

I don't like lists filled with things I don't want to be remembered of yet. Cleaning the fridge for example. I have added this as repeated task, repeats after 3 months. This works nicely, should I postpone this task for some time it gets scheduled 3 months after I do it.

However, when it gets rescheduled it shows up right in the middle of tasks that really need to be done and in front of all undated tasks.

A tip in another thread solved this. The smart list "Home" now filters for
location:@home and not (dueAfter:"1 week of today" and (isRepeating:true or tag:zzz))

This way repeating tasks only appear a week before they are due. It is also possible to "sleep" un-repeating dated tasks using the zzz tag